Spanish women top flirting league table

MADRID: Step aside sleek Parisiennes, fun-loving Britons and sultry Italians: Spanish women are the world’s greatest flirts, according to an online study released by a dating website on Tuesday.

Spanish women are the most likely to “make the first move” with a man, according to the social network Badoo.com, which studied flirtation behaviour based on 90 million romantic contacts made on its site in a month.

The resulting “World Flirt-ation League” ranked 20 countries by the number of contacts with a man initiated by the women in each country.

Forget Spain’s conservative Catholic traditions: Spanish women topped the table by a comfortable stretch, making an average of 1.33 contacts with men per month.

Just behind came Poland, the Dominican Republic, Italy and Argentina - with Latin countries, speaking either Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, holding eight of the top 10 places.

Canada was the highest-ranking English-speaking country, in ninth place, and the only non-Catholic country in the top 10.

Germany ranked 12th in the table, Britain 14th, France 17th and the United States a lowly second from last, according to Badoo, which claims some 80 million registered users in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.

The Spanish figure was almost double than that for British women - who made 0.78 “moves” towards men on the site - France, where the figure was 0.69, or the United States at 0.63.

Overall, Badoo found that men were still far more likely than women to make the first move, both in Spain and elsewhere.

“But we wanted to know whether women in some countries were more likely to take the lead than those in others - and what this said about those societies,” the website’s marketing director Lloyd Price said in a statement.

And if Spanish women are the world’s biggest flirts, the study authors suggested, their menfolk also win an honorary title: that of “the world’s luckiest” men.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th, 2010.